Showing results by author "Geoffrey Schmitt" in All Categories

Secure in Love, Free to Grow Formed by Grace, Found Faithful What if faithfulness does not begin with effort — but with security? In Secure in Love, Free to Grow, Geoffrey Schmitt explores a simple but life-altering sequence: grace secures us, security frees us, freedom forms us, and formation produces faithfulness. Many believers live with subtle pressure — striving to prove worth, fearing failure, measuring growth by performance. Others, reacting against pressure, drift into passivity. This book offers a third way: a life rooted in secure love that naturally matures into steady ...

The Great Threads invites readers to step back and see the Bible as a single, coherent story—woven patiently across centuries, cultures, and lives. Rather than approaching Scripture as a collection of disconnected passages or doctrines, this study traces seven recurring themes that appear again and again from Genesis to Revelation: God’s presence, creation and renewal, promise and covenant, deliverance and freedom, wisdom for daily living, suffering and redemption, and the hope of God’s kingdom. Each chapter follows one of these threads through the biblical story, showing how it ...

Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Schmitt opens the door to the world behind the words of Scripture—bringing fresh understanding to familiar passages by exploring the cultural details that made Jesus’ teachings so vivid to His first listeners. Each chapter focuses on a single phrase, image, or action rooted in the daily life of the ancient world and draws out the spiritual depth we sometimes miss in modern readings. With warmth, clarity, and pastoral insight, Dr. Schmitt weaves together biblical teaching, personal reflection, poetry, and questions for study or discussion. Whether you’re reading alone...

What is normal Christianity? For many believers, the Christian life has been reduced to fragments — forgiveness without transformation, worship without power, evangelism without sacrament, structure without Spirit. In Normal Christianity: The River of Sacrament, Gospel, and Spirit, Geoffrey “Willingheart” Schmitt explores a return to the biblical pattern of the early Church — a Church rooted in Word and Table, bold in Gospel proclamation, and alive in the power of the Holy Spirit. Drawing deeply from the Book of Acts and the letters of Paul, and inspired by the vision of Patriarch ...

A Life Shaped by Love is the tender spiritual memoir of a pilgrim shaped not by achievement or certainty but by the gentle, persistent love of God. Through childhood faith, seasons of wandering, the wilderness of grief, the joys of ministry, and the surprising grace that appears in unexpected places, Geoffrey Schmitt traces the long arc of God’s transforming presence in an ordinary life made extraordinary by love. Each chapter invites readers to see their own story within the pilgrimage — shaped by companions, deepened by suffering, brightened by surprise, softened by aging, and ...

Conversion is often described as a single dramatic event—or dismissed as a slow, lifelong process. In truth, it is both. In When the Scale Tips: Moments of Conversion, Geoffrey Schmitt explores the decisive moments when faith shifts from possibility to commitment—when resistance gives way, when truth becomes unavoidable, when mercy disarms the heart. Drawing on Scripture, history, pastoral experience, and prison ministry, this book examines the varied ways conversion begins and deepens. Each chapter focuses on a distinct pattern: crisis and rock bottom, reasoned conviction, sudden ...

His Mercy Endures Forever, His Grace is Sufficient God’s Compassion from Genesis to Revelation This Bible study traces the beautiful arc of God’s mercy and grace from the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem. With nine chapters and an epilogue, it invites readers to encounter the God who clothes, protects, restores, forgives, and welcomes again and again. Each chapter includes biblical teaching, meditation, a personal reflection from the author, a poem, questions for reflection, and a prayer—making it ideal for both personal devotion and small group study. Whether you’re a new ...

“I was in prison and you came to visit me.” —Matthew 25:36 Prison walls may separate men and women from society, but they do not separate them from the love of God. Breaking Chains: The Gospel and Prison Ministry is a powerful call to action for individuals, churches, and communities to engage in life-changing prison ministry. This book explores: • The biblical foundation for ministering to the incarcerated. • The spiritual needs of inmates and the power of redemption. • How individuals and churches can step into prison outreach. • The impact of movements like Kairos Prison ...

What we remember shapes how we live. In Remember and Live: Memory, Identity, and Faithfulness, Geoffrey Schmitt explores the spiritual importance of remembering as a central practice of faith. Drawing from Scripture, pastoral experience, and deeply personal stories, this study invites readers to see memory not as nostalgia or regret, but as a living act of obedience. From family stories and national history to suffering, healing, communion, and resurrection hope, Schmitt traces how God calls His people to remember truthfully — and how holy forgetting can free us from what no longer gives ...

12 Steps and the Bible: Coming to Christ in Recovery is a spiritually grounded journey through the Twelve Steps, woven with Scripture, honest storytelling, and pastoral wisdom. Drawing from decades of ministry, recovery work, and Kairos Prison Ministry, Geoffrey Schmitt (Willingheart) shows how the natural movement of the Twelve Steps leads directly toward Christ—through honesty, surrender, confession, amends, prayer, and service. Each chapter includes Scripture, teaching, meditation, a personal reflection from the author’s life, a poem, questions for deeper thought, a prayer, and a “...

The Symbolic Bible: Seeing God’s Message in Metaphor invites readers to explore the rich, evocative language of Scripture’s most enduring symbols — from light and salt to the lamb, lion, rock, cross, and more. Each chapter unpacks a key biblical image, offering thoughtful teaching, meditations, personal reflections, poems, questions for deeper engagement, and prayers. Designed for both individual reflection and small group study, this book helps readers discover how God communicates profound truth through images that speak to the mind, heart, and imagination. Whether you are a ...

Marriage in the Bible takes readers on a journey from Genesis to Revelation, exploring the beauty and brokenness of marriage through Scripture, history, and contemporary challenges. Part One looks at Old Testament foundations, where covenant love is revealed amid polygamy and human failure. Part Two highlights Jesus’ teaching, lifting marriage to its God-given dignity while pointing to the eternal banquet to come. Part Three explores Paul’s balance between marriage and singleness, his profound vision of marriage as a mystery, and his insistence that leaders model covenant fidelity. Part...

The Joy Set Before Us is a devotional Bible study exploring how joy — not stoicism or sheer willpower — is the true engine of Christian endurance. Drawing from Hebrews 12:1–2, this book traces the many ways joy sustains the believer through suffering, fellowship, peace, hope, and the finish line of faith. Through Scripture, Teaching, Meditation, Reflection, Poetry, Questions, Prayer, and the Smithy’s Forge exercises, Geoffrey Schmitt (“Willingheart”) weaves together stories from pastoral ministry, Kairos prison weekends, family life, grief, healing, and unexpected moments of ...

For generations, Christians have treasured the saying attributed to Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary, use words.” Its wisdom has shaped lives of compassion, humility, and service. Yet in a changing cultural landscape, that wisdom has often been misunderstood—and its unintended consequences quietly felt. If Necessary, Use Words traces the journey of the Social Gospel from its faithful roots through a season of silence that contributed to secularization, declining church influence, and a thinning of Christian meaning. Drawing on Scripture, history, and ...

Many people long to hear God clearly — especially when decisions matter most. Yet much of real life is lived without certainty, in seasons where clarity does not come and faith feels incomplete. Discernment Without Certainty invites readers into a wiser, humbler way of listening. Drawing on Scripture, pastoral experience, marriage, leadership, prison ministry, and personal loss, Geoffrey Schmitt explores discernment not as a method for securing answers, but as a lifelong practice of attentiveness, patience, and trust. Through themes such as consolation and desolation, false peace and true...

A Personal Relationship with God: From Knowing About Him to Walking With Him invites readers beyond religious familiarity into living fellowship with the God of Scripture. Beginning in Eden and tracing the biblical story through covenant, incarnation, cross, indwelling Spirit, prayer, trials, obedience, and friendship, this study shows that the Bible is not merely a collection of doctrines or moral instructions. It is the unfolding story of a God who seeks relationship. Through pastoral insight, personal testimony, and careful engagement with Scripture (KJV), Geoffrey Schmitt explores what ...

In an age that questions everything, faith still speaks — gently, wisely, and true. Sharing Faith in a Skeptical Age explores how reason and relationship can work together to open hearts to the Gospel once again. The Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Schmitt (known to many as Willingheart) guides readers through ten chapters that trace the rebirth of belief in our time — from doubt that leads to faith, to reasoned witness, compassion, wonder, hope, and the revival now stirring among a new generation. Drawing on decades of pastoral ministry, Kairos prison work, and spiritual reflection, Dr. Schmitt ...

Prayer is often treated as a technique, a transaction, or a last resort. In The Power of Prayer: How God Works Across Time, Distance, and the Human Heart, Geoffrey Schmitt invites readers into a deeper, truer understanding: prayer as relationship, presence, and formation. Drawing on Scripture (KJV), decades of pastoral ministry, prison outreach, prayer groups, and lived experience, this study explores how prayer operates beyond ordinary limits—across time and distance, through suffering and silence, within community notes and personal longing. Each chapter unfolds prayer not as something ...

Always Reforming: The Protestant Reformation and What the Church Must Keep Learning explores the Reformation not as a settled argument of the past, but as an ongoing spiritual challenge for the Church today. Beginning with the biblical pattern of reform and moving through the causes, key figures, divisions, and unintended consequences of the sixteenth-century Reformation, this Bible-history study examines how sincere faith led both to renewal and to fracture. It gives careful attention to the voices of multiple reformers, the Catholic Reformation, and the long-term costs of confessional ...

In a time when faith is often either privatized or politicized, Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount sound both gentle and bracing: “You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world.” In Salt and Light: Living the Kingdom in a Fading World, Geoffrey Schmitt (Willingheart) explores what it means to live these metaphors faithfully—not loudly, not defensively, but with quiet conviction and enduring hope. Through ten reflective chapters, this study unfolds the everyday power of Christian presence. Salt preserves what might otherwise decay; light reveals what might ...